Discovering Marine Life in the Red Sea

INTRODUCING NEXT-GENERATION SUPERCOMPUTING

The Supercomputing Core Lab selects Hewlett Packard Enterprise to build a new supercomputer that will be the region’s most powerful

Computing capacity is increasingly driving innovation and discovery in academic research. Supercomputers – physically larger and more powerful than desktops and laptops – are crucial in fighting pandemics, scaling up clean energy systems and discovering new artificial intelligence pathways.

KAUST has the Shaheen II supercomputer on campus, which is maintained and operated by the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab. In September 2022, KAUST announced its plans for its next-generation supercomputer Shaheen III, which will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Shaheen III will be more than 20 times faster than Shaheen II, and it will be the most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East upon completion. The machine will process information at speeds of up to 125 petaFLOPS; a petaFLOP is one quintillion – a billion billion – calculations per second.

Their power allows supercomputers to model and simulate scientific problems far faster and with greater accuracy. More than half of KAUST’s faculty uses Shaheen II for their work, and researchers from more than 20 external organizations have been granted access, helping KAUST to fulfill its Vision 2030 objectives of embracing innovation. Shaheen II plays a crucial role beyond the KAUST campus, such as in weather forecasting. The Supercomputing Core Lab has been collaborating with the Kingdom’s National Center for Meteorology (NCM) since 2016 to improve the center’s capacity to model and forecast weather, which is crucial for air travel, agricultural yields and air-quality advisories, and other key issues of public health. Environmental models to track and predict weather conditions require supercomputer levels of computational power.

The staff at the Supercomputing Core Lab has helped NCM upgrade its own supercomputer; store and back up data; build capacity on operating supercomputers; and maintain and manage equipment. By 2021, five years into their partnership, NCM’s computational capabilities increased from 10 trillion calculations per second to 380 trillion per second. The second phase of the project, which was recently completed, boosted this capability further to 1.8 quadrillion calculations per second.

These improvements help meteorologists improve forecasting; NCM now has the computational power to update its weather forecasts every hour, instead of four times a day.

Shaheen III, which is expected to be fully operational in 2023, is set to be built using HPE’s Cray EX supercomputer platform, the company’s most sophisticated supercomputing offering. HPE’s technology has emerged as the preferred choice for scientists studying meteorology.

Shaheen III’s initial workload is expected to include analyzing data on clean combustion, Red Sea ecosystems, climate modeling and the Arabian tectonic plate. It will also be enlisted to help design new materials for solar panels, envision new industrial catalysts to enhance energy efficiency and reduce waste, discover new medicines, improve the recovery of hydrocarbons and enhance the ability of plants to survive droughts in desert environments. Further bolstering its reputation in the global supercomputing community, a multidisciplinary team from KAUST, along with fellow researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was selected as finalists for the 2022 Gordon Bell Prize at the 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, also known as SC22. The award is given in recognition for achievement and innovation in the application of high-performance parallel computing to the field of science and technology.

On the success of SC22, Saudi Arabia’s Assistant Minister for Human Resources and Social Development Mohammed bin Nasser Al-Jasser said, “Sincere thanks to KAUST for all its efforts to develop the future leaders of Saudi Arabia. SC22 is a very important event in the industry. Such exposure will help students gain real-world perspectives in addition to their academic experience.”

HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

“We are honored to help fuel Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 for a new era of innovation by empowering KAUST with a state-of-the-art supercomputer.”

Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

TONY CHAN President of KAUST

THE NEW HPE CRAY EX SYSTEM WILL ALLOW US TO CONDUCT RESEARCH ON A LARGER SCALE, RESULTING IN SIGNIFICANT SCIENTIFIC, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ADVANCES.